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What Are the Goals of Language Teaching? 44 Iranian Journal of Language Teaching Research 1(1), (Jan., 2013) 44-56 Content list available at www.urmia.ac.ir/ijltr Iranian Journal of Language Teaching Research Urmia University What are the goals of language teaching? Vivian Cook a, * a Newcastle University, UK A B S T R A C T For many centuries people who speak more than one language, that is to say second language th (L2) users, have been admired. In the 16 century an advisor to Elizabeth I of England said: ‘For even as a hawk flieth not high with one wing, even so a man reacheth not to excellency with one tongue.’ Roger Ascham, The Scholemaster, 1570 In the 21st century the education minister for Elizabeth II proclaimed: ‘It is literally the case that learning languages makes you smarter. The neural networks in the brain strengthen as a result of language learning.’ Michael Gove, UK Education Secretary, 2011 Yet, despite these public statements, bilingualism is more often seen as a problem to be solved than an asset to be developed. Second language (L2) users indeed have problems, whether social, psychological or economic – like everyone else. But few of these stem from their bilingualism itself. Keywords: multilingualism; language teaching; multicompetence; L2 user © Urmia University Press A R T I C L E S U M M A R Y Received: 3 Nov. 2012 Revised version received: 17 Dec. 2012 Accepted: 22 Dec. 2012 Available online: 25 Dec. 2012 * Corresponding author: Newcastle University, UK Email address: [email protected] © Urmia University Press Vivian Cook/What are the goals of language teaching? 45 Conceptualising multicompetence This paper looks at the goals of language teaching from the multicompetence perspective. Multicompetence is defined as ‘the knowledge of more than one language in the same mind or the same community’ (Cook, 2012). It thus looks at second language acquisition (SLA) from the point of view of the L2 user as a whole person rather than from that of the monolingual native speaker. L2 user is the term for ‘someone who is actively using a language other than their first, whatever their level of proficiency’ (Cook, 2012); the term is preferred over ‘bilingual’ or ‘L2 learner’ as a more neutral term for the multicompetent user of more than one language, however much they know. Multicompetence involves the whole mind of the speaker, not simply their first language (L1) or their second. It assumes that someone who knows two or more languages is a different person from a monolingual and so needs to be looked at in their own right rather than as a deficient monolingual. Multicompetence changes the angle from which second language acquisition is viewed, hence the reason why it is here called a perspective rather than a model or a theory. If taken literally, it has important implications for language teaching goals and methodology. The antithesis of the multicompetence perspective is the monolingual perspective based on the native speaker model, usually defined as ‘a person who has spoken a certain language since early childhood’ (McArthur, 1992, 692). The crucial overall thrust of the multicompetence perspective is then to put the L2 user at the centre rather than the native speaker. Characteristics of L2 users So what are these L2 users like? First let us see how many of them there are. While it is almost as difficult to count L2 users as it is to count monolinguals, we can find some relevant figures: 46 Iranian Journal of Language Teaching Research 1(1), (Jan., 2013) 44-56 two billion people are learning English around the world, according to the British Council 90% of children in Europe are taught English in secondary school 71% of people in Singapore can read in more than one language 56% of EU citizens can have a conversation in two languages, 10% in three 438 languages are spoken in the EU, 300 in London children in English schools have 240 different home languages 42.6% of people in California speak another language than English in the home 43.5% of people in Toronto speak another language than English or French From this we can deduce that probably the majority of people in the world use more than one language, very often English. In a sense it is now normal to use more than one language in your everyday life. Hence, far from L2 users being outsiders and exceptions to the norm, they are typical modern people of the 21st century: the dwindling number of monolinguals may now be considered as people who live unusually sheltered lives. What are the characteristics of these multitudes of L2 users? The research built up over the last fifteen years suggests that they are unique in many ways, such as the following: L2 users think in slightly different ways from monolinguals. Cook and Bassetti (2011) described the revised form of the linguistic relativity hypothesis as applied to bilingualism: L2 users demonstrably think differently from their monolingual peers. One theme is categorisation experiments such as Cook, Bassetti, Kasai, Sasaki and Takahashi (2006), which showed that Japanese people who had been in England longer than three years had lost some of their preference for categorising objects in Vivian Cook/What are the goals of language teaching? 47 terms of material to the English preference for using form. Another is the question of colour perception. Speakers of English have a single colour which they call blue, whether it is the blue of the sky or the blue of a sapphire. Speakers of some other languages see two colours, corresponding to English light blue and dark blue, called ble and ghalazio in Greek, ao and mizuiri in Japanese and sinij and goluboj in Russian. Where an English eye sees one colour, speakers of other languages see two. When you learn another language, your colour perception shifts slightly towards the L2 usage. So your two Greek blues are affected by your single English blue (Athanasopoulos, 2009). Learning another language affects other areas of your mind than those devoted to language. L2 users use language in different ways from monolinguals. One instance of this is the ability to use two languages at once, i.e. codeswitching – alternating between two languages within the same situation or conversation, as most L2 users do when talking to other people who share the same languages. There are complex rules for switching, based on the topic or social roles. Codeswitching is a complex use of language drawing on two grammars and two sets of vocabulary virtually instantaneously, as seen in the following example from a column in the newspaper Gibraltar Panorama. Telephone conversations between Cloti and Cynthia Wink and nod... I say, have you noticed how the police se han espavilao in going out against fishing where fishing should not take place, even en el quarry? My dear Cloti, of course I have. I also know, or have often heard, que la polilla are independent when it comes to operational tasks, so how come that before they were mas manso que un perrito? 48 Iranian Journal of Language Teaching Research 1(1), (Jan., 2013) 44-56 Don't ask me, querida Cynthia, pero you must be aware of the Wink and Nod way of doing things, after all you are half English so you must know of such things! By the way, dicen que tenemos un earthquake under the Rock where los plates meet. L2 users do not simply duplicate the uses of language that monolinguals employ: they have unique uses of language of their own, like code-switching and translation. L2 users have an increased awareness of language itself compared to monolinguals. Metalinguistic awareness has been a constant research topic with L2 users, with the result that people’s awareness of language has been shown to be increased by learning another language. Young children who learn another language are for instance more conscious of the arbitrariness of language. Ben Zeev (1977) played a game with children in which she told them ‘the way to say “we” is with “spaghetti”. How would you say, “We are good children?"’. Children who knew another language were better than monolinguals as they better appreciated the arbitrariness of language, i.e. they replied ‘Spaghetti are good children’ more often. This enhanced feeling for language may be one reason why there are so many bilingual writers, whether Vladimir Nabokov, André Brink or Catherine Lim. L2 users have a slightly different knowledge of their first language. If you test the knowledge of the L1 in L2 users, you find it has minor differences from the L1 of monolinguals in many aspects. Vocabulary experiments by Spivey and Marian (1999) and Beauvillain and Grainger (1987) showed that your first language is never turned off when using your second language. For phonology, experiments with L2 users in their L1 by Queen (2001) on intonation and many others with Voice Onset Time (e.g. Zampini & Green, 2001), say English bit/pit versus French bière/pierre, showed that the L1 pronunciation of L2 users was subtly different from monolinguals. An L2 user is not Vivian Cook/What are the goals of language teaching? 49 just an L1 user with an L2 tacked on; the L2 has changed all the languages in their mind. L2 users have different brain structures from monolinguals. Research into brain structures is still highly experimental and no result seems to be safe for more than a handful of years. Nevertheless research suggests that long-term use of a second language increases the connections between the brain’s hemispheres (Coggins, Kennedy & Armstrong, 2004) and that even short-term use may increase the amount of gray matter in some areas (Kwok, Niu, Kay, Zhou, Jin, So & Tan, 2011).
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